There’s something about short, dark days and unforgiving winter weather that can make life start to feel like one long, gloomy blur. If you find yourself with a constant desire to cancel plans and stay in bed around this time of year, you’re not alone. Around 1 in 20 adults in the U.S. experience a form of winter depression known as seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
The indoor office environment has a reputation for making us sick due to mold, cleaning chemicals, infectious coworkers, and quite a few other factors. One benefit offered by working from a home office is a lot more control over indoor air quality, from open windows to electronics.
From preventing snoring to clearing acne, there seems to be nothing you can’t accomplish with a little mouth taping. Wellness influencers are praising the viral TikTok trend as the ultimate key to deeper, more restorative sleep. But social media anecdotes are a far cry from scientific proof.
Cooking can be one of the biggest indoor air quality hazards when proper precautions are not taken. Different cooking methods come along with different degrees of risk. Most of us are aware that burning natural gas to cook indoors will always have a bigger negative impact on air quality than cooking the same thing with an electric stove.
Wintertime in the Northern hemisphere can often require more of us than other seasons. We need to stay warm, participate in festive events, and fight off the inevitable waves of viruses that result from close quarters and noses running in the cold dry air. One way to consider how to keep healthy during the winter season is to stock up on the nutrients and other resources that are used up surviving the holiday season.
Whether it is adding healthy habits or subtracting the unhealthy ones, changing our behavior for the better can be really hard. International Mind Body Wellness Day is on the first Tuesday of 2023, and it is the perfect day to start down the path of wellness. Not with all healthy choices and no unhealthy choices, that is impossible.
Having the right gear in cold weather can be literally life-saving, just like wearing the right masks to protect from airborne pathogens. Most of us know a lot more about masks than we have in the past due to the ongoing global pandemic, but it might not be totally clear how or even if warmth and safety can be combined.
When you spend time among the trees, hearing twigs snap beneath your feet and birds calling out to each other from above, it does something to your brain. Walking in nature is refreshing and reinvigorating in ways that other exercise and leisure activities just aren’t. And it’s more than just good vibes and fresh air.
Whether you’re worried about finding a turkey or burnt out on traditional holiday fare, it may be time to spice up the menu when hosting this holiday season. Give yourself the freedom to think outside the turkey-or-ham box and serve your guests something deliciously unexpected. There’s no shame in branching out from the holiday classics—that’s how new traditions are born!
From October when the Halloween candy starts to show up through December when we show love with large and dense meals, a healthy relationship with food during the holidays can sometimes be challenging. The stressful holiday season is possibly the worst time for our diets to go uncontrolled. 64% of those of us with mental illness say it gets worse during the holidays.
The short answer is that KN95 and N95 have been shown to be roughly equivalent. KN95 is an equivalent Chinese standard to the American standard N95 or the European FFP2. KN95 masks are not approved by the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), but the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for KN95 masks during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
We spend around a third of our lives asleep, and most of us put effort into getting the best sleep we can. Apart from looking for the right bedding and nighttime environment, a great technique to improve sleep is to use a wearable sleep tracker. We obviously can’t know what we’re doing when sleeping, so wearing a sleep tracker on the wrist or finger can provide information on physical activity during sleep, which can be a good indicator of sleep quality.